RCV Failures

In Alaska, a Republican state, the more popular Republican candidate lost to a Democrat.

In a state where over 60% of voters vote Republican, the RCV algorithm selected Mary Peltola, a Democrat, as the newly elected congressional representative. Although Republican candidates initially garnered 60 percent of the vote, the Democrat emerged as the winner.

Republican candidate Nick Begich was eliminated in the first round of RCV despite being more broadly acceptable to the electorate than either of the other two candidates. Based on the Cast Vote Record, he would have defeated each of the other two candidates in head-to-head contests, but he was eliminated in the first round of ballot counting due to receiving the fewest RCV first-place votes.

Importantly, Democrat Peltola’s 91,266 votes represented only 48.40% of the 188,582 ballots that were active in Round 1. In other words, more people voted for her Republican opponents in Round 1. Thus the oft-repeated claim that RCV “guarantees a majority for the winning candidate” is not true if by “majority” we mean “majority of all votes cast.”

11 percent of the ballots in Alaska were “spoiled” due to voter confusion under ranked-choice — more than three times the normal rate. Nearly 15,000 Alaskans had their ballots thrown out. This included more than 11,000 tossed because voters selected only one candidate without ranking any others. When that candidate was eliminated, their votes were eliminated as well. So much for “one man, one vote”.

Ten states have already banned RCV, including Idaho!

Seeing the disastrous consequences of RCV across the country, many states are now taking things into their own hands to secure their election and protect “one man, one vote”. Idaho, Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Montana, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Kentucky have banned RCV recently, citing concerns about its effectiveness and potential for errors. Missouri is aiming to join the RCV ban this year while Alaska is seeking to repeal the current RCV scheme which disenfranchised so many Republican voters in 2022.

Importantly, just in 2023, Governor Brad Little and the Idaho State Legislature voted to ban RCV. That is not stopping the Washington D.C. billionaires and special interest groups from spending millions of dollars trying to overwhelm the will of the people, represented by their state legislators.

California selected the wrong winner.

An error in the tabulation of ranked-choice votes led to the wrong candidate being declared the winner of an Oakland school board race. That candidate took office before the error was caught, and the rightful winner did not replace him until four months later. The error occurred when the registrar applied the wrong algorithm to the counted ballot data.

Maine’s winners often won without a majority of voters.

In Maine’s Second Congressional District election, more than 8,000 ballots were thrown in the trash. Bruce Poliquin (R) received 46.33 percent of the vote ahead of Jared Golden’s (D) 45.58 percent. But since Poliquin didn’t receive 50 percent, there was a second round of tabulation. The secretary of state threw out more than 8,000 ballots and Golden was declared the winner—but with only 49.2 percent of the total ballots cast.

A study across 96 elections in Maine revealed that 61 percent of Ranked Choice Voter victors did NOT win by a majority of the total votes cast. After ballots were exhausted, the number of valid ballots used to determine a majority was less than the number of total votes cast. Winners, therefore, often failed to reach a true majority.